All Hellraiser Movies In Order

Looking for your next 90’s cult horror movie franchise? Hellraiser has got you covered. Gore, Jumpscares, 90’s horror logic, and an 11-movie-long franchise, the Hellraiser franchise has enough content to keep your horror hunger satisfied and your Spine chilled with the fear of ever meeting a Cenobite.

Hellraiser is a British-American Horror franchise based on characters from the novella “The Hellbound Heart” by Clive Baker. While five of the eleven movies follow a set timeline the others can be enjoyed as standalone movies and the latest movie is a remake of the original one.

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In this blog post, we will discuss the chronological order to watch the movies, the best order to watch the movies, and the current situation of the franchise.

Hellraiser Movies In Chronological Order

If you are looking to watch this franchise, the chronological order is one of the routes you can take. It will slowly guide you through all the movies where all the dots connect and make sense, but the downfall of this order is that it forces you to watch movies that do not contribute to the Hellraiser timeline. The Chronological Order goes as follows:

1. Hellraiser – September 10, 1987
2. Hellbound: Hellraiser II – December 23, 1988
3. Hellraiser III: Hell On Earth – September 11, 1992
4. Hellraiser: Bloodline – March 8, 1996
5. Hellraiser: Inferno – October 3, 2000
6. Hellraiser: Hellseeker – October 15, 2002
7. Hellraiser: Deader – June 7, 2005
8. Hellraiser: Hellworld – September 6, 2005
9. Hellraiser: Revelations – March 18, 2011
10. Hellraiser: Judgement – February 13, 2018
11. Hellraiser: 2022 – October 7, 2022

The Watch Order Of Hellraiser Movies

The Watch order for the Hellraiser movie states that we should watch all the movies that are connected to the timeline and exclude the one which is not or is loosely connected to the previous movies, those movies can be watched as standalone additions to the other movies. The watch order goes as follows:

1. Hellraiser

   Streaming On: Prime Video, Hoopla, Tubi TV

   Director: Clive Barker

   Writer: Clive Barker

   Stars: Dough Bradley, Claire Higgins, Ashley Lawrence

   Genres: Supernatural, Horror

   

   Frank Cotton, played by Sean Chapman, a pleasure seeker, buys a puzzle in Morocco that he thinks will open the gates to otherworldly pleasures. After solving the puzzle in the basement of his home, hooked chains emerge from it which tear him apart and drag him to hell. While being held captive in hell, he faces physical torture at the hands of the cenobites, genderless demon creatures who later reset the puzzle and the basement goes dark. 

   Larry, Frank’s brother moves into his house with his wife Julia and daughter Kristy. One day he drips some blood on the attic floor from a wound that revives Frank in a Ghoulish form. Julia is seen being persuaded by Frank to invite men from the bar, extracting their blood will resurrect Frank in its natural form. Kristy, Larry’s daughter discovers victims and half-skinned Frank and is always suspicious of Julia.

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   She finds victims in the attic and is noticed by Frank who tries to capture her but she escapes along with the puzzle box. Frank’s chase to get Kristy, and Julia meeting her doom is a frightening change of events in the movie. Kristy makes several attempts to destroy the puzzle but is eventually saved by a nomad that is burned and vanishes in the night. The movie is left on a cliffhanger showing the merchant carrying the puzzle and offering a new customer luring him with the appealing joys it can offer. 

   On release, the movie was praised as Barker’s amazing debut. Initially, the movie was not even released in Ontario, as it didn’t pass the regulations because the gore proved too much for the audience. 

2. Hellbound: Hellraiser II

   Streaming On: Prime Video, Tubi TV, Roku

   Director: Tony Randel

   Writer: Clive Barker

   Stars: Dough Bradley, Claire Higgins, Ashley Lawrence

   Genres: Supernatural, Horror

   

   The movie starts by showing the backstory of the Leader of the Cenobites, Pinhead. Kristy has been admitted to a psychiatric ward and is interviewed by Dr. Channard. Channard is obsessed with the Lament Configuration. He brings over the cursed object to his house and forces one of his mentally ill patients to cut himself with a razor and bleed all over the object, following which Julia is released. MacRae had been investigating Channard and on witnessing this sight flees to get the help of Kristy. Rated X on release, The movies were restricted to the age of 17 and above. Considered to be a weak sequel on release, retrospective reviews state Hellbound to be the best sequel of the 3 more to come.

3. Hellraiser III: Hell On Earth

   Streaming On: HBO Max, DIRECTV

   Director: Anthony Hickox

   Writer: Anthony Hickox, Tony Randel

   Stars: Dough Bradley, Tony Farrell, Paula Marshal

   Genres: Supernatural, Horror

   

   Following the event of the second movie, Pinhead splits into two separate entities, Spencer representing his human side and the other being the Cenobite whose soul is trapped in the “Pillar of Souls”. Joey a news reporter witnesses the death of a person who opened the puzzle box and then receives it from a homeless person. While investigating the history of the puzzle box, Joey finds a video from Kristy Cotton which explains its purpose. 

   Concurrently, the pillar is bought by J.P. Monroe a club owner, who Pinhead manipulates into helping him restore his full power. The movie received an overall mixed reception on release but was commercially more successful than Hellbound. 

4. Hellraiser IV: Bloodline

   Streaming On: HBO Max, DIRECTV

   Director: Kevin Yagher

   Writer: Peter Atkins

   Stars: Dough Bradley, Bruce Ramsay, Valentina Vargas

   Genres: Science Fiction, Horror

   

   This movie is split into three parts, considered a prequel and a sequel but you have to go on a Hellraiser movie marathon and watch the first three parts before you watch this three-part movie and save yourself some confusion. 

   First Timeline

   In the year 2127, Dr. Paul Merchant locks himself into a room, on the Minos (a futuristic ship) with the puzzle and makes a robot solve it, and releases Pinhead and his army. He is then thrown behind bars for his action, while Pinhead and his army ravage the people on the ship.

   Second Timeline

   This part of the movie deals with the creation of the puzzle box. In 1796, Philip LeMarchand a French toy maker in Paris creates the Lament Configuration at the request of Duc de L’Isle an evil aristocrat. On its delivery, Philip watches Duc’s assistant, Jacques kills a slave girl and uses her skin as a sacrifice to summon a demon, Angelique. Horrified, Phillip rushes home and immediately starts working on an anti-lament configuration.

   Present Timeline 

   This part of the movie shows where the third movie is left off. An architect, John Merchant has finished a skyscraper resembling the Lament configuration. Angelique kills Jacques to head to the skyscraper and tricks a guard into completing the configuration. She and Pinhead clash due to the difference in their morals but call a temporary truce to kill John before he completes the Elysium (anti-lament) configuration.

   Later on, as the movie develops, you see Dr. John Merchant and Rimmer flee away on a space shuttle which itself is the Elysium configuration. The anti-lament configuration is seen closing on itself while the lead cenobite, the Pinhead, is trapped inside and both get destroyed for good. 

   On release, the movie was flooded with negative reviews calling the movie “too complicated”, “a pointless mess,” and even incoherent by many. The Staff made a questionable decision by not screening the movie for critics. 

5. Hellraiser: Hellseeker

   Streaming On: Hulu, Disney+

   Director: Rick Bota

   Writer: Carl V. Dupre, Tim Day

   Stars: Dough Bradley, Ashley Lawrence, Dean Winters

   Genres: Supernatural, Horror

   

   After surviving a car crash, Trevor Gooden wakes up a month after the accident to find his wife missing and his memory wonky due to a head injury. Two investigators interrogate him separately, considering him a prime suspect in a murder case.

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   Strange incidents start befalling him, he starts hallucinating and is unable to differentiate between his reality and his imagination and ends up running away for his life from a monster which he can’t decide is real or not. As the sixth installment in the Hellraiser series, the movie went under the radar of many, and the ones who did watch it called it mediocre and called it a copy of the cult classic “Jacob’s Ladder”.

Hellraiser Movies Having Stand-Alone Stories

1. Hellraiser: Inferno

   Streaming On: HBO Max, DIRECTV

   Director: Scott Derrickson

   Writer: Paul Harris Broadman, Scott Dickerson

   Stars: Dough Bradley, Craig Sheffer, James Remar

   Genres: Supernatural, Horror

   

   Joseph Thorne, a corrupt detective, finds the puzzle box at a murder scene and takes it home. After solving the puzzle, Thorne starts hallucinating and sees a vision in which he can make out who committed the crime and left the puzzle box there, it was someone named ”The Engineer”. When Thorne starts going after ‘The Engineer’, every time he takes a step closer to the murderer, someone from his family or close friends would get murdered and he would find a baby’s finger at the crime scene. Was this a clue pointing him in a direction or just a ruse to distract him from reaching the truth? 

2. Hellraiser VII: Deader

   Streaming On: HBO Max, DIRECTV

   Director: Rick Bota

   Writer: Neal Marshall Steven, Tim Day

   Stars: Kari Wurher, Dough Bradley, Paul Rhys

   Genres: Supernatural, Horror

   

   Amy is sent to Bucharest to investigate a cult the “Deader”, which was caught killing and reanimating one of its followers on tape. Going to the sender’s address Amy finds Marla’s (the sender) corpse tightly holding onto a puzzle box. Opening the box, Amy summons a vision of Pinhead. Heavily interested in the sub-culture in Bucharest, Amy lands on the feet of the “Deaders” Leader Winter LeMarchand, who plans to use Amy’s childhood trauma to unleash terror on Earth. The constant decline in the reputation of Hellraiser was only increased after this movie’s release, with a half-baked script, shallow characters, and flawed plot Hellraiser 8 was given unanimously negative reviews and was forgotten about very quickly. 

3. Hellraiser: Hellworld

   Streaming On: HBO Max, DIRECTV

   Director: Rick Bota

   Writer: Carl Dupre

   Stars: Dough Bradley, Henry Cavil, Lance Henrickson

   Genres: Supernatural, Horror

   

   Hellworld, an addictive online computer game has taken the world by storm. Fans of the Hellraiser series have started playing this game. We follow a group of 5 who play this game regularly. Adam, a member of the group gets too invested in the game and ends up committing suicide. The rest of the group regrets not trying to help Adam before. Two years later the group receives invites to a Hellworld Party and collectively agrees to go. As they enter the party, the host kills the group in different rooms. After dying the group starts hallucinating and gets stalked by the cenobites while the host keeps texting them in their casket.

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   Taking a meta route on the franchise, the movie establishes itself as the only real timeline and marks the previous movies as movies in their world. This change was not enough to change the public perspective of the franchise and the bad production of the movie didn’t help either.

4. Hellraiser: Revelations

   Streaming On: Hoopla, Plex

   Director: Victoria Garcia

   Writer: Gary J. Tunnicliff

   Stars: Steven Brand, Stephen Smith Collins, Nick Eversman

   Genres: Supernatural, Horror

   

   Tired of their everyday lives, Nico and Steven decide to run away to Mexico to party hard and vlog the whole event. They successfully execute the plan but disappear in thin air, never to return. Mexican authorities return all of their belongings including a videotape and a rustic puzzle box. A year later the two families come together for dinner, where a heated argument erupts between them about Stevens’s mother not revealing the contents of the videotape.

   As both families watch the contents of the tape, Stephen’s sister opens the puzzle box making a skinless and emaciated Steven reappears from the ground. This movie was made within weeks because Dimension Movies had to release a movie to keep the rights to the franchise. The rushed production showed clearly in the movie and the found footage genre was only used for convenience. 

5. Hellraiser: Judgement

   Streaming On: Vudu, Plex, Redbox

   Director: Gary J. Tunnicliffe

   Writer: Gary J. Tunnicliffe

   Stars: Damon Carney, Randy Wayne, Paul T. Taylor

   Genres: Supernatural, Horror

   

   With the rapid evolution of human technology, configurations have become a relic of the past. To discuss the same, Pinhead, played by Paul T Taylor, meets up with the Auditor of the Stygian Inquisition. Meanwhile on Earth, 3 detectives Sean and David Carter, and Christine Egerton, are going after a serial killer, “preceptor” who murders according to the 10 Commandments. 

   Following a suspect, Sean walks into a hospital where he faints instantly and wakes up to the Stygian Inquisition passing their judgment for the sins that Sean committed. On his deathbed, right when the axe of fate is swung, Sean is saved by Johphiel, an angel. Tired of the previous bad sequels, Director Gary J. Tunnicliffe decided to pitch a script that he had worked on for years, and when the distributors needed another movie to be released to keep the franchise rights, Tunnicliffe was given a chance. The passion and hard work behind the script were clearly visible and the movie received positive reviews comparing it to the previous sequels and calling it the best since the second Hellraiser movie.

6. Hellraiser

   Streaming On: Hulu, Hulu Original

   Director: David Bruckner

   Writer: David S. Goyer, Ben Collins, Luke Piotrowski

   Stars: Odessa A’zion, Jamie Clayton, Adam Faison

   Genres: Supernatural, Horror

   

   Said to be a remake of the original 1987 Hellraiser, the 2022 adaptation takes a very different story route. Living with the three people she adores the most, Riley is a recovering drug addict. One day Trevor, Riley’s boyfriend decides to break into an abandoned warehouse where they find an old puzzle box that they take home. Due to returning late, Matt, Riley’s brother gets into a heated argument with her, ending with her leaving the house.  At an empty park, Riley solves the puzzle and barely dodges a cut from a blade emerging from the box. 

   The Cenobites appear asking her to make a sacrifice. Following this one by one Riley gets stuck in impossible conditions where she will have to lose someone close to her. The movie received some criticism for casting a female actor for the role of Pinhead but the gamble paid off as Clayton’s performance in the movie was praised heavily by the critics. The movie was called a refreshing take on the Hellraiser series and it can be the resurrection of the franchise.

Conclusion

Hellraiser is among the cult movies that have amassed quite a following in the years since its first release. Hellraiser suffers from the 90s Horror syndrome, to copy the success of the first movie an endless amount of sequels have been produced some good but most of them are subpar which has plummeted the popularity of the series into the ground. All is not sad, as the 2022 remake had been received positively by the critics and praised for the direction the series would take in the future.

All Hellraiser Movies Sorted By Their IMDB Ratings

1. Hellraiser (1987) – 6.9
2. Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988) – 6.4
3. Hellbound (2022) – 6
4. Hellraiser III: Hell On Earth (1992) – 5.5 
5. Hellraiser: Inferno (2000) – 5.4
6. Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996) – 5
7. Hellraiser: Hellseeker (2002) – 4.9 
8. Hellraiser: Deader (2005) – 4.4
9. Hellraiser: Judgement (2018)- 4.3
10. Hellraiser: Hellworld (2005) – 4.2
11. Hellraiser: Revelations (2011) – 2.7

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